Publisher: Walker & Company Edition: Hardcover, 165 pages Average Rating:
BleekerBooks.com Review
You can't intimidate someone who just doesn't care.
Matthew Cape is a nice guy. Steady, dependable. Good worker. But when his wife comes home and catches him with another woman, Cape decides to chuck it all and hit the road. He buys the vintage Corvette he's always wanted and burns rubber as he leaves Chicago, heading south.
He catches a mugger in New Orleans. Skydives in New Mexico. Keeps moving, always moving. Finally he travels up the California coast to San Francisco, where he meets Tanya and Boone Judson.
Tanya was the recruiter. She trawled the hotel bars, looking for fools and their money in town for one convention or another. She was good looking enough and charming enough to reel them in. Cape didn't fit the usual profile, but he had money, and that was enough. Cape was an avid gambler, but strictly small-time until Tanya invited him to sit on on their high-stakes poker game.
Boone was the mechanic. He got the players together, made them feel comfortable, and went to work. By the end of the night he'd taken several thousand dollars from them, but there was no proof, so no one said anything.
Except Matthew Cape. He was savvy enough to spot the cheat, and bold enough to act on his own. After the game was over he had a chat with Boone and Tanya and relieved them of a bag full of their ill-gotten gains.
The money he returned to the other players, but there was something else in the bag. Surveillance photographs of a woman, a very beautiful woman, presumably the Judsons' next mark. It didn't take long to find the photos had been taken in Lake Tahoe, so Cape set out to find the woman, and warn her.
If only he'd known what he was getting into. In short order he found the woman, her pugnacious husband, her sexually rapacious sister, and another man, the woman's friend, possibly her lover, certainly protective. They're all suspicious of Cape's story, but grudgingly accept it. But when another night of gambling ends in murder, Cape realizes he's in over his head, and no one is interested in helping.
This book unfolds like an old Gold Medal paperback, with an innocent man tangled up in circumstances beyond his control. Like many of Pronzini's characters, Cape is just an ordinary man, no superhero, but he calls up strength and resolve he didn't know he had. A good thing, too, because to get this killer, he'll need them.
Customer Reviews:
Step to the Graveyard Easy Rating: The old pro (pronzini) did it again. I did not like Matt Cape and for the most part I was glad that this was a short book. But the last chapter changed everything. Including how I rated this book. (before the final chapter I was going to rate this book a 3) I have been a fan of Bill Pronzini for over 20 years and this is far from one of his best. Read Blue Lonesome or Wastland for Strangers if you want to see him at the top of his game.
Superb! Rating: When I started Steps To The Graveyard Easy, I was unsympathetic to the protagonist Matt Cape. He was a man with a stable family, good job, and someone well thought of by most people. He purposely turns all of this upside down and abandons everything and everyone to ostensibly find true "freedom" by heading for the open road. But was this his real motive for giving up everything? Along the way, Pronzini paints a picture of Cape that seems to stretch one's thoughts about him and his actions to the point of being unbelieveable. But, that's the genius of Pronzini's writing and one soon finds great empathy and positive feelings for Matt as the meanings of his actions become known.
While not as long as King's The Stand or as broad in scope as Long's The Descent, this is a book that feels like it and if it were any longer would be superfluous.
This is a suspensful story with a good plot and with chartacters that are completely believable. This book has several moral dilemmas, along with a great murder/mystery, that are resolved quite nicely and the twist ending begs the question "What would you do?"
Outstanding Rating: Outstanding book from the very start to the last word. I think it is Pronzini's best since A Wasteland Of Strangers.
haunting noir Rating: All his life Matthew Cape has been considered a good person, a kind and honest man whom works hard and is faithful to his wife. In the middle of a day, his world is turned upside down when Anna walks into her bedroom and sees Matt with another woman. After Anna confronts him and leaves Matt packs up and leaves home for parts unknown.
He travels all over the country seeing new places and enjoying the wild side of life. In San Francisco, con artists Tanya and Boone Judson take him in but Matt manages to turn the tables on them and regains his money. Though something Judsons let slip and through photographs, Matt travels to Lake Tahoe where he comes in contact with true evil and takes a stand that will either mean his salvation or his damnation.
This novel is neither pretty nor neat but it is an honest reflection of the human condition. Bill Pronzini, author of the famous Nameless Detective series, lays bare the soul of his protagonist in such a way that readers will come to accept his choices he made. STEP TO THE GRAVEYARD EASY is literary noir that is dark, brooding and very haunting, a book that the audience will long remember.
